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Passengers Stuck for Hours in Long Lines Amid Passport Control Meltdown

Border control at many of the UK’s biggest airports was disrupted for multiple hours on Tuesday evening after electronic passport gates suffered a nationwide outage.

Thousands of passengers landed at London Gatwick — Europe’s eighth busiest airport — late on Tuesday to face massive delays in entering the country.

This reporter was among those to face the huge lines, spending almost two hours queuing to get through passport control — longer than the flight from France I’d taken.

Similar issues were reported at major airports nationwide, including hubs like Europe’s busiest airport, London Heathrow, as well as Manchester, Birmingham, and Edinburgh.

“Only the manual desks are being manned and it’s going to take a while to get through,” one airport staff member shouted to passengers who had just disembarked a flight only to see crowds filling the hallways.

“All airports in the UK are impacted,” she added.

Polly Thompson

The crowd was left waiting in the increasingly hot corridor, slowly edging forwards with no idea how long the delay would last. Many made calls to relatives, telling them not to wait up.

There was mostly no access to toilets or water, and buggies carrying disabled and elderly passengers could not pass through the crowds.

“It’s absolute chaos. They’re telling us nothing,” complained one passenger, who had just flown back from holiday in Benidorm, Spain, with his family.

A group of upbeat young men cracked jokes, drawing a few laughs from tired passengers.

“Oh… and it’s another long corridor boys,” they joked as the crowd slowly moved around yet another corner in the airport. “Every ten feet we have to cheer.”

“Let’s light a cigarette and set off the fire alarm. That would get us all out of here quickly,” said another.

As the temperature in the packed hallways began to rise, others became more frustrated.

“We have no idea what is happening. These are crazy queues in Gatwick airport,” Gedi, a Lithuanian national returning to his home in the UK, told BI. “I’m feeling very sweaty and very hot.”

After around 50 minutes, BI’s reporter entered the main border control hall, where more staff were on hand, trying their best to calm the crowds and handing out bottles of water.

“It’s a national outage of the e-gates,” one airport official confirmed to BI. “The Home Office will know more, but it’s across all the airports nationwide. It’s unplanned.”

A massive

The state of a business’s industry can determine long term success

What determines a businesses long-term success? Some researchers argue it comes down to industry timing.

Aside from market appetites, company productivity, marketing reach, or any other factors that weigh into a business’s impact and durability, a new study found that the longevity of a company depends on the state of the industry during its time of inception – and the general environment in which it grows.

According to D. Carrington Motley, an instructor in entrepreneurship at Carengie Mellon University, the founding conditions of a company could weigh more on its long-term trajectory than changes in the market.

“A venture’s performance following environmental change depends on its internal processes,” he said in a press release. “Environmental conditions at a business’s founding shape those processes, and they quickly become cemented and embedded in beliefs about how to operate.”

Although understanding industry norms and trends has long been held as a key to entrepreneurship success, Motley and fellow researchers found that social, economic, and technological changes make industry knowledge or prior experience increasingly less relevant. This is because teams need to adapt to developments that previously-stable industries were unprepared for.

Motley and other researchers examined the performance of more than 1,000 ventures, all of which were founded from 1960 to 2011. These businesses specialized in a wide range of industries – from energy and utilities to agriculture – and the research team assessed data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to measure how active and changing different industries were when each company started. On top of this, the researchers used alumni survey data to understand how long businesses lasted.

The research found that companies achieved the most success when changes in the market match the conditions they started in. But the study also found a stabilized industry environment can make a company less likely to succeed if the team is accustomed to perpetual change.

Wesley Koo, another co-author of the study, said “in more predictable environments, being more aggressive can produce better outcomes.”

This could come down to risk-aversion.

“The risk of untested assumptions is less, so continued use of risk averse processes produces fewer benefits and may detract from a venture’s ability to respond to opportunities.”

The study found that “slower decision-making” was a key factor in the long term success of a company.

When a business started in